Exhibition of Forty New Works by Fabienne Verdier at Jaeger Bucher Gallery

Each of these canvases is imbued with a subtle balance and a consistent theme: the quest for the simple.

PARIS.-The Jaeger Bucher Gallery is staging "Painting", an exhibition of some forty new works representing a year's labour by Fabienne Verdier: primarily paintings based around landscapes, tree structures and circles, but also ink and charcoal paper drawings together with the most recent prints.

Known for her ten-year apprenticeship in China with masters of calligraphy and painting, recounted in "The Dragon's Brush", then for her plain and precise pictorial style characterized by single brushstrokes, Fabienne Verdier has produced a new series of paintings in which a long-pursued mastery of gesture generates the spontaneous emergence of form. It is impossible to fit Fabienne's work within any school. Her painting is eminently personal. Internal and spiritual, it is the product of an immense creative freedom. The freedom of an artist for whom an ancestral technique acts as both bedrock and springboard for the emergence of a succession of inspired acts, which now guide us towards the metastructures of life.

Make no mistake about these metastructures: they are totally consistent with that infinitesimal brushstroke - so long practised - out of which everything emerges. In this, Fabienne Verdier's painting is continuous with the experiments of the American abstract artists - Tobey, Kline, Still, Pollock or de Kooning - and carries on the work of the great artistic explorers of line, like Matisse, Michaux or Degottex...

Each of these canvases is imbued with a subtle balance and a consistent theme: the quest for the simple. Nothing is surplus to requirement. The background is charged with a resonant reality, composed of layers and sub-layers that evoke the immensity of the void, giving free rein to the radiant brilliance of the pigment, sometimes blazing red, sometimes vibrant green, sometimes arborescent loam, sometimes Cistercian white. The form is spontaneous, emergent, expansive, inchoate... and in its ink reveals the enigma of its mineralisation. Through a clever play of contrast, the black of the ink or charcoal mirrors the background hue of the canvas, and vice versa.

Fabienne Verdier's great frescoes take us deep into the alchemy of painting and the immensity of the landscape reveals its multiple shapes in constant movement. We are immersed in the Essence of the real, in the depths of a primordial silence, a silence all the more necessary to Fabienne in that it allows her to give free rein to her body as paintbrush, in its role as a pendulum between the Universe and the center of the Earth. Standing at the heart of the canvas, the act of painting imbues the ink with an interiority of vision that suggests the structure of life and links the infinitely small with the infinitely large. The connection between the line of the charcoal on paper and the line of the ink sliding across the canvas is, in this respect, magisterial. Through the living spontaneity of these pictures, Fabienne Verdier unifies tradition and modernity and allows us to experience a moment of eternity in the midst of the Tumult.

The artist's work that belongs to the National Museum of Modern Art collections is included in the Centre Pompidou's Elles exhibition in October and an exhibition of her tribute to the Flemish primitive painters at the Groeninge Museum in Bruges will be held in spring 2012.